


dancing into your heart

by polkadot



Category: Original Work
Genre: Athletes, First Time, M/M, Pining, Tennis, teammates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-25 15:28:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10767096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polkadot/pseuds/polkadot
Summary: A Davis Cup weekend turns into something more.





	dancing into your heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aeiouna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aeiouna/gifts).



When Sasha saw Oleg in the locker room on the day that started it all, he jerked his chin in acknowledgment, blissfully unaware of what the coming weekend would bring. He was in high spirits. It was Davis Cup quarterfinals, facing a team that couldn’t beat Team Ukraine’s B-squad - which was good because Sasha, devilishly handsome superstar and modest to boot, had a bum ankle that squealed under pressure and made his physio look even more constipated than usual. And his physio usually looked pretty damn constipated.

But Oleg and the rest of Sasha’s team could deal with Kazakhstan in their sleep, so even though Sasha had offered to play the doubles rubber, the captain would probably leave him on the bench. Which meant Sasha would be spending the weekend perched uncomfortably on a hard chair on the sidelines, clapping and trying not to look bored. Look bored for one second – or just have a resting stankface – and everyone on Twitter was dissecting your Team Spirit and perhaps even making memes. Sasha wasn’t entirely sure the invention of Twitter was a good thing. (Though he was _on_ Twitter, of course. Still.)

Apart from chafing a little at the role of glorified cheerleader, though, Sasha figured the weekend should be pretty fun. After practice they’d put their suits on and go to the team dinner, where they’d smile for the cameras, chat with the Kazakhs, and be careful to stay on the good side of their hardass team captain. (She was new this year, after the last captain got fired because of internal federation politics, and Sasha liked her. Although she scared him.) Then tomorrow the matches would start, with hours of watching the Kazakh guys smash racquets and swear while his teammates dismanted them in style. Sasha could think of worse ways to spend a weekend.

So he jerked his chin at Oleg, and then grinned, giving Oleg the full Sasha Balanchuk experience, cheesy charisma and all. He felt great, despite the bum ankle. Maybe he’d risk his captain’s disapproval (and even more terrifyingly, his nutritionist’s) and have a beer or two tonight. After all, you were only young once. 

“Save it for the fangirls,” Oleg said, rolling his eyes, but he was laughing inside. Sasha had known him since they were shorter than the tennis net, and he knew what the crinkle at the side of Oleg’s eyes meant. Oleg was an open book to him.

“You’re just jealous of my fangirls because you don’t have any,” Sasha said, winking. 

Fan attention was great. Sasha didn’t take it for granted. He could remember when he was a skinny teenager, all knobs and knees, without the muscles and stamina needed to back up his raw talent. He hadn’t had fans back then, not when he and Oleg shared hotel rooms and strung their own racquets and paid for their own kits, not when he was careful to keep his language clean on court not out of PR reasons but because he couldn’t afford to pay the fine. He certainly wasn’t complaining that all that had changed, now that he was successful and famous and more wealthy than he’d ever dreamed of.

(There were downsides, of course. With fame had come death threats from disappointed gamblers, the inability to go out in public without being mobbed, incessant demands for Sasha’s attention and time, and more boobs and dicks in his social media private messages than he knew what to do with.)

“Uh-huh,” Oleg said, looking unimpressed. “When one of them puts a sextape of you on the Internet, don’t come crying to me.”

“Hah. The Internet would combust.”

Though honestly Sasha did worry a little about that. His mama didn’t need those sorts of headlines – and forget that he was twenty-six years old, his mama could still read him the riot act. But he couldn’t let on to Oleg about that, although Oleg had met Mama and could probably guess. Superstars and fangirls went together like caviar and vodka (and sometimes _with_ caviar and vodka…) His playboy image was part of his charm.

There was a gleam in Oleg’s eyes that Sasha didn’t quite trust. “Right.”

“Right,” Sasha echoed, and shoved his shoes into his locker.

Later, he’d wonder if perhaps this was the moment that Karma raised her head and laughed.

~

Twelve hours later, Sasha was having a beer in the hotel bar. One beer wasn’t breaking training, right? Well, that’s what he’d tell his trainer, anyway, if anyone caught him. But his captain and the rest of the team had turned in for the night, getting some all-important shuteye before the matches tomorrow, so nobody was around to snitch on Sasha’s less laudatory after-hours pursuits. 

Though really, people who got all judgey about one beer were annoying. He understood his nutritionist’s gimlet attention to detail, even as he cheerfully cheated here and there. He paid the nice lady to pay attention to every calorie and nutritional need, after all, so if she scolded him for his occasional hamburger, it was her job. But the thinkpieces that painted him as unprofessional for liking a drink now and then were over the top. It wasn’t like he was, what, Boris Becker or something, having one-night stands in broom closets, or Andre Agassi, with his crystal meth. Just because Pierre Dubois was a gluten-free vegan who did yoga and talked a ton of woowoo shit and boasted about never touching sugar or alcohol in his life, that didn’t mean that journalists had to take the lazy way out and paint Sasha as the Decadent Depraved One.

Sasha scowled at his beer. Pierre Dubois. Merde. He was the kind of guy who put a smiley after every tweet he sent, and pretty quickly it stopped looking genial and started looking passive-aggressive. Nobody smiled that much. Sasha privately thought a few beers and a few less alfalfa salads would do Pierre a load of good. 

Not that the alfalfa salads hadn’t done wonders for Pierre’s physique. Sasha remembered when they were in juniors, and Pierre had always been stocky and solid next to Sasha’s tall lankiness. While Pierre’s woowoo hadn’t done too much for his tennis – he’d always been Sasha’s closest competitor with or without alfalfa – it’d given him a set of abs any guy would be proud of. He got nearly as many wolf whistles as Sasha did when he changed his shirt in the set breaks (what? Sasha was competitive about _everything_ , of course he was keeping track), and while Sasha was far too focused on his tennis to sneak glances himself, he wasn’t above a sly look or two in the locker room. 

Pity Pierre was straight and had that perky smiley girlfriend. Now that would have been a power couple to rival Steffi and Andre. Although if Sasha remembered correctly from a few shared hotel rooms during their Challenger year, Pierre did snore like the dickens. Perhaps his life was more peaceful without Pierre’s snores, alfalfa sprouts, and incessant emojis.

Sasha sighed. Although he had a sparkly playboy reputation to match his overstuffed trophy cabinet, he’d started to feel too old for one-night stands, glamorous models, and the slim dark-eyeliner skinny-jean flirtations that had marked his earlier years. When he’d first broke on to the scene as a boy wonder, winning his first Slam at age nineteen, he’d let the fame go to his head, and had decided that settling down was for losers. Now sometimes he found himself wistfully thinking of someone familiar to curl up on the couch with after practice and watch Real Madrid with. Someone to cook tacos and shoot some hoops and snuggle in bed on lazy mornings, someone who knew just how he liked his dick sucked and could be a loyal support on days where none of his shots wanted to land inside the lines. Playing the field was fun, but it could get lonely too.

Damn. He was getting maudlin. 

That would never do. Not on a rare stress-free weekend, when all he had to do was sit on his butt and cheer on his teammates. These weekends were for having fun, not for getting all emo and feeling sixty-six instead of twenty-six. He was in his prime! He’d find someone eventually. But now it was time for fun.

He downed the rest of his beer decisively, then caught the bartender’s attention. Forget moderation. He didn’t like feeling lonely. He’d do something about it.

~

Two hours later, Sasha no longer thought that had been a good idea.

“What the fuck.” It wasn’t a question. Oleg’s sleepy voice was pissed off.

“You have to come help me,” Sasha informed him. Forget pissed off, they’d been friends since Rod Laver was playing tennis (well, maybe not quite that far), so Oleg was obligated to help. There was certainly nobody else in the hotel he could call, not unless he wanted his captain to come down and yell at him, and he really didn’t want that.

“It’s like, one in the morning or something,” Oleg said. “I play tennis tomorrow. Did you forget that?”

“Olezkha,” Sasha said, shamelessly wheedling. 

Silence for a long minute, and then a loud sigh and the sound of a lamp being clicked on. “Do you have a lady friend in your room who’s refusing to leave?”

“No,” Sasha said, feeling righteously indignant.

“Did you pull all the stuff out of the minibar and build castles on your table again? I told you last time, I’m like ninety-nine percent sure that just putting it back doesn’t mean they don’t charge you.”

“I’m not actually in my room,” Sasha stage-whispered. He wasn’t entirely sure why he was stage-whispering, but it seemed like a good idea.

“God help me,” Oleg said. “Where are you? Please tell me you haven’t been arrested for soliciting. Your mother will kill me.”

“Why would she kill you?” Sasha asked, momentarily diverted. “She’d be too busy killing me.”

“I promised her I’d look after you,” Oleg said. He sounded more awake now, and Sasha could hear him moving around his room. “Wait. Is it cocaine? Did you take drugs? You know you can get suspended for that. Even if you say a druggie kissed you. I don’t think people would believe you – they didn’t even really believe Gasquet, and you have a reputation.”

“I’m not _stupid_ ,” Sasha said, indignantly. 

“It’s nearly two in the morning and you’re calling me to bail your ass out of something. I’m assuming it’s something stupid. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

Sasha didn’t want to argue. It wasn’t helping and it was eating up valuable time. “Come down to the bar. That’s where I am. Help.” 

“Sasha –”

Sasha hung up. He was a bad person. But Oleg would come down and help him, because Oleg was a good person, and he never said mean things about Sasha to the media, not like some other players Sasha might mention, who were really just sour grapes because Sasha kept winning all the Slams, and so what if he had a really good serve and didn’t have backhands like the sainted Roger Federer used to have, that didn’t mean his Slams were any less Slammier than anybody else’s, and if anybody wanted to tell L’equipe that Sasha was a loutish bear of a man with more power than brains, they should have the guts to do it on record and not on background, although really Sasha was pretty sure that he knew where the quote came from, it might have as easily been signed with a smiley face.

Maybe Sasha was a little drunk.

“Look, I don’t know why you’re mad,” the guy at his table said. “You looked great!”

Sasha held up a finger. It seemed to be swimming slightly. “We’re waiting for Oleg.”

Things could have been worse. The guy could’ve fucked off and not talked to him in the first place, and then he would’ve woken up tomorrow morning with a hangover and a bad case of headlines. (Or an onslaught of Twitter replies, depending on which app he checked first.) At least star power was good for something, it was keeping the guy at the table until Oleg arrived.

“Can I ask you something?” the guy said. He had big ears and he looked like the type of person who clung to the fences at practices and asked for autographs afterwards. 

Oleg tried to focus on his face. “Yeah?”

“When you played Dubois in the Wimbledon final last year –”

Sasha was too drunk for the direction he sensed this was going.

“In the fourth set, the third game, on that break point - _how_ did you send that backhand around the post and kiss the line? I’ve watched it like a hundred times and it’s crazy. How do you even practice that?”

You don’t, Sasha thought, you try for shots and sometimes you’re having a particularly good day, or the gods are smiling on you, or Karma helps you out, and your shots land in and the other guy’s don’t. Some players are more talented than others and have those days more often. But some shots are always just luck. 

“Guess I’m just that good,” he said, with a cheesy wink, because explaining all that was way too much trouble right now. Plus he had a reputation to uphold. Cockiness was part of it.

“Excuse me,” Oleg said, from behind them. 

“You ran,” Sasha said, grinning up at him. 

Oleg glared at him. “Hi,” he said to the guy across the table. “I’m a friend of Sasha’s. What trouble is he in?”

“Oh, he’s not in trouble,” the guy said, sounding a little offended. “He was really good. I told him that people are going to love this video.”

Oleg’s grip on Sasha’s arm tightened, and he obeyed its summons to get up from the table. “Be right back,” he said over his shoulder, as Sasha pulled him slightly aside. “Don’t go away.”

“Please tell me you didn’t,” Oleg said, in a hiss of an undertone.

Sasha blinked at him. “If you talk in code we’re going to be here a long time.”

“I was _joking_ earlier, you jackass. God. Seriously? Are you that horny that you have to share it with _everyone_?”

It was still code, but Sasha thought he got the gist of it. “I didn’t make a sex tape, you weirdo.”

Tension ebbed out of Oleg’s shoulders, but he still looked pissed. “What am I supposed to think, there’s a guy sitting there saying you were great in a video, and we were just talking about sex tapes!”

Sasha turned to look at the guy, despite Oleg trying to stop him. His ears really were big. “He’s really not my type,” he told Oleg in an undertone.

Oleg winced. Perhaps not so much of an undertone. “Okay. Back up. Explain. Quickly.”

Sasha left the loneliness out of the story. “I had a few drinks, and the bar was really quiet and nobody was doing anything interesting, so I thought it would be interesting if I danced a little bit.”

Oleg pinched the bridge of his nose. 

“And then, well, there was someone cute, and I thought, well, anyway, I –”

“Spit it out,” Oleg said, sounding woebegone.

“Do you just want to watch the video?” the guy said, from behind them. He was totally not the cute person. He was getting on Sasha’s nerves, to be honest. “I promise, it’s a great video. Everybody will love it.”

Oleg watched the video in silence. Sasha didn’t need to. He’d lived it. 

He could see it play out across Oleg’s face, though. That grimace must have been when he’d climbed on top of the bar. That gritted teeth must have been when he started twerking. Oh, and that lip bite must have been when he started rubbing himself down. 

Sasha’s memory got a little mercifully hazy after that.

After it was over and the tinny music from the phone’s speakers had stopped, Oleg ran his hands through his hair. It was nice hair. Even woken up in the middle of the night, it looked artfully tossed. Sasha’s hair was dumb. He’d eventually given up on trying to make it do cool things and just buzzed it short, relying on his cheekbones and good looks to do the work. Oleg’s hair always made you want to touch it. 

Sasha was beginning to think that last drink had been a mistake. 

“Okay,” Oleg said. “Sasha, go upstairs. Here’s my room key. Take a cold shower. I’ll be up soon.”

Sasha opened his mouth to protest, but Oleg’s face made him reconsider. And after all, if he obeyed, that meant he didn’t have to deal with this problem anymore. Oleg was responsible and sober, two things which qualified him over Sasha. Excellent plan.

He saluted, took the room key, and left meekly. If he hurried, maybe he’d be asleep before Oleg got upstairs to scold him. 

~

No such luck. When Sasha stepped out of the bathroom, Oleg was sitting on the foot of the bed glaring at him.

“Um.” Sasha felt a lot more sober after the cold shower, but he was only wearing a towel around his waist, and he was a big guy. He felt drastically underdressed for this conversation. Not that Oleg hadn’t seen everything before – they were athletes and they often shared a locker room, after all. Everybody’d seen everything. 

But this wasn’t the locker room, and his dick hadn’t forgotten that he was lewdly dancing on a bar not very long ago. Even the cold water couldn’t daunt his dick for long.

Luckily Oleg wasn’t looking at the towel. “I don’t even know what to say to you this time, Sasha.”

“C’mon,” Sasha protested. “Athletes in other sports get up to way worse. Have I ever hurt anybody? Have I ever taken drugs? Except that one time in Ibiza, and that doesn’t count, it was the offseason, and it wasn’t even _bad_ drugs, I’m no Agassi.”

Oleg didn’t look impressed. 

“And everyone I sleep with is really thrilled about it,” Sasha said, making an abortive expansive gesture with his hands before grabbing for his slipping towel and just rescuing it. “Nobody’s ever said I was inappropriate with them or regretted having sex with me.”

“We’re at Davis Cup,” Oleg said. “You couldn’t keep it in your pants for one night? This isn’t you and your wild shenanigans. A few weekends a year, you get to represent your country and be on a team with me and the other guys. And you couldn’t put us first for one weekend?”

When Oleg put it that way, Sasha began to feel a little bit like a heel. 

“But you were already in bed!” he protested. “It’s not like I left you somewhere and swanned off to play big-shot! I just wanted a drink.”

“A drink,” Oleg said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “A drink made you climb on top of a bar and dance like _that_.”

“Okay, more than one drink. But it was only supposed to be one. I didn’t mean to do it. And anyway, dancing never hurt anybody!”

Oleg looked up at him, at Sasha’s big innocent eyes, and after a minute he sighed. “Forget it. Whatever, Sasha. Give me your room key, I’ll sleep in yours. I don’t want you wandering around the hotel like this.”

“Don’t whatever me,” Sasha said, as Oleg got up to leave. “C’mon, man. Just because you don’t dance…”

“I can dance,” Oleg said. He was close to Sasha now, almost up in his personal space. The room wasn’t that big. They were in Kazakhstan, not Monaco – the hotel rooms weren’t palaces, they were just hotel rooms, and Oleg was close enough to see his eyelashes. “Just because I don’t dance on hotel bars doesn’t mean I can’t dance.”

“I like dancing,” Sasha said. He was having trouble thinking. It might have been the alcohol, but that had mostly worn off. Oleg smelled like warmth and cotton sheets. “It’s fun.”

Oleg had stopped pretending not to look at his lips, and Sasha’s breath was no longer coming regularly. 

They hadn’t done this since their first year at ATP level, not since they’d been young pros drunk on their own early success, not since they’d shared hotel rooms and, one fateful night, more than just a hotel room. They’d been eighteen and horny, and Oleg’s mouth on his dick had been less skilled but more memorable than anybody that Sasha had slept with since. 

And then they’d woken up and it’d been awkward, and Sasha hadn’t been sure if Oleg even did boys or had been experimenting due to Sasha’s overwhelming sex appeal and convenient nearness, and Oleg had clammed up and hadn’t wanted to talk about it, and after a few weeks Sasha had decided that Oleg must want to never talk about it. Their friendship had never really missed a beat, but Sasha had never thought there was a possibility of it happening again.

Until now.

“You wanna dance with me?” he asked, softly, bringing his hands to Oleg’s waist.

The suavity of that line failed because moving his hands meant that his towel fell to the ground and pooled around his feet, leaving him very naked. Oleg rolled his eyes. 

But he didn’t move away.

“C’mon,” Sasha said, and started swaying a little to an invisible beat. “Dance with me. Or I’ll start twerking again.”

“Oh god,” Oleg said. “Shut up,” and kissed him.

Sasha liked dancing, but he could get on board with kissing too. 

~

“I think you dance pretty well,” Sasha said after, waggling his eyebrows.

“Of course fucking you doesn’t stop the innuendo,” Oleg told the ceiling, though his sarcasm lacked the bite it usually had. “Why would it I think it would?”

Sasha flung an arm over him, pulling him close. Kazakhstan was cold this time of year. “Go to sleep. You have a match tomorrow.”

“Fuck,” Oleg said, eloquently. “I forgot.”

“It’s not till the afternoon,” Sasha said. “You’ll be fine.”

Oleg fell asleep quickly, curled close against Sasha’s side. Sasha lay awake for a long time, thinking. 

Would this be like last time? Would Oleg refuse to ever talk about it again? What had changed? Why had Oleg basically jumped him? Was it because of the little towel? Maybe he should wear little towels more often. Was it because of the video of his lewd dancing? Sheesh, he’d Snapchat Oleg a dance video every day.

(Come to think of it, what _had_ happened to that video? Waking up to headlines and Twitter replies would be a little easier if he woke up to them with Oleg in his arms, but it would still suck. Especially once his mama saw the video and called him. There are some things mamas are never meant to see, and one of them is their kid strutting what the good Lord gave him, swinging his shirt around his head, and gyrating his hips.)

Sasha pressed a kiss to the back of Oleg’s ear and let himself drift to sleep at last. No use in borrowing tomorrow’s worry. He’d know soon enough.

~

Golden sunlight streaming through the blinds woke him. It was still early, early enough that the captain hadn’t come round to roust them all out of bed for team breakfast before morning warmups. Sasha spared a moment’s thought to imagine her face if she’d barged in on them curled round each other like puppies, but the majority of his brain was focused on the way the golden light bathed the curve of Oleg’s back, dappled and firm. He wanted to taste it, but he wasn’t sure if he’d be allowed to, here in the morning after the night before.

“Good morning,” he said, when he saw Oleg’s eyelashes fluttering on his cheek. Best to jog Oleg’s memory right away.

“Good morning,” Oleg said. His tone was hard to read.

“So,” Sasha said, when no more seemed to be forthcoming. “Is my video on Youtube? Am I going to be reading articles about how I’m a horrible lasviscious person and I should be suspended for bringing the sport into disrepute?”

“If you’re trying to do a bad Alec Moreau impression,” Oleg said, “he hates you because he loves Pierre and you keep stealing Pierre’s Slams. I bet he isn’t actually as moralistic as he pretends. If Pierre ever gets caught doing anything, he’ll make excuses for him.”

Sasha didn’t really want to talk about Pierre, not when Oleg was in his arms and his dick was extremely interested in that fact. Oleg had to have noticed. He hadn’t moved.

“But as far as the video goes,” Oleg said, “I bought it off the fan. At least, I paid him to delete it. And then made sure he did. Barring some technological wizardy, I think you’re safe.”

“Nice guy.”

“He was pretty scared of me. And I don’t think he actually wanted to make your life difficult.” Oleg turned in his arms. They were lying very close on the pillows. “He seemed to be of your life persuasion – everything is awesome, why be ashamed of anything. He genuinely seemed to think it wouldn’t cause you any trouble to have that video online.”

“I’ve never been ashamed of anything in my life,” Sasha admitted. “Hell, I’m not ashamed of dancing on top of that bar. Why should I be? I wasn’t hurting anyone, and my body’s a treasure to mankind.”

Oleg rolled his eyes, which was exactly the reaction Sasha had been going for.

“But I’m glad it’s not on Youtube,” Sasha said. “If only to spare me Moreau’s handwringing and Mama’s lectures.”

“That’s a formidable combination,” Oleg said. His voice was distracted, like he hardly knew what he was saying, and he looked rumpled and perfect. 

Sasha took a chance and kissed him.

Oleg kissed him back, warm in the morning sunshine, their hands winding together in the sheets. Sasha could lose himself like this; he’d had a lot of epic nights, but far fewer quiet mornings, with someone he cared about beside him. That had never been the priority. 

Now he wondered why it hadn’t been.

“I was ashamed,” Oleg said, into the quiet space between them, when they finally broke apart. “Or, not ashamed, exactly, but scared. Scared of what it meant, if I liked you. Ukraine isn’t the greatest place to like guys. And you – you were always so confident, and I was just your friend, never as good, never as bright.”

Sasha kissed his jaw, listening, hearing Oleg’s voice catch.

“And then when I figured out that I did like guys, and that I especially liked you, and – and that maybe after a while I only liked you, you were –”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but Sasha knew what he meant. 

Sasha had won his first Slam the month he turned twenty, and he’d never looked back. He’d always been a so-called star of the future, ever since he could remember, but he’d been catapulted overnight into superstardom, the cute sexy talented face of the future, and it had gone to his head. Those had been his glitziest years, the ones where the nights ran together. 

“I’m not asking for anything,” Oleg said, his words running together. “But last night, you were – you looked so – you were sitting there with your shirt off, and your eyes glittering, and that video was – and then you were up here in that stupidly small towel –” 

“Are you explaining why you were totally understandably overcome with lust for me?” Sasha said, letting his voice rumble against Oleg’s ear.

“Jerk,” Oleg said, poking him in the stomach, hard.

Sasha grabbed his hand and pinned it to the sheet, then kissed him, settling into it. He intended to be here a while. 

“Wanna dance?” he said, when they broke for air.

“I have a match this afternoon,” Oleg said, trying for indignant but failing. It was hard to be convincingly indignant when your face was red and you looked adorably well-kissed. 

Sasha considered. “Just a blowjob then,” he said, and slid down the bed, trailing a hand across Oleg’s tight stomach. 

“Fuck,” Oleg said, and then that was the only thing he said for quite a while.

They made it to team breakfast on time, rosy and innocent. And if they played footsie under the table, nobody noticed.

~

“I’m never going to be Pierre,” Sasha said, as they lay in bed the next night. The final day of the tie was coming up, but both of the reverse singles were dead rubbers, since they’d won all three of the first rubbers. Sasha had known his team could beat the Kazakhs even without him. So nothing was in jeopardy and they could just relax and focus on their personal shit. Which for Sasha was this.

“I hope not,” Oleg said, with that little tiny grin that meant he was genuinely amused. “Pierre has a lot of runner-up trophies, and I’d hate for you to start being runner-up all the time.”

Sasha would hate that too. “I mean, I’m not going to be all yoga vegan woowoo, and go all mindful and precious and emoji.”

Oleg didn’t need any of that translated. He knew Pierre too. “I wouldn’t ask you to,” he said. “I like you the way you are.”

“But if you let me dance on bars and eat rare steaks and cheat on my diet,” Sasha said, plunging ahead, “I’d like to try to make this work.”

Oleg looked at him, eyebrow quirked. “Can you really give up the fangirls?”

“Fangirls _and_ fanboys,” Sasha promised. “Unless you’re up for a threesome sometime.”

Oleg pretended to consider it. “Maybe that video-taking fanboy would be up for it.”

“Not him,” Sasha said, laughing. “Although I do owe him a debt for precipitating all of this.”

“Give him Wimbledon tickets if you see him again,” Oleg said, leaning down to kiss him. “We’ll call it even.”

Sasha kissed him back, and soon forgot everything except the feeling of Oleg in his arms.

It had been an eventful Davis Cup weekend, and it had gone places he would never have imagined, but it had all come right in the end.

So very, very right.

He smiled into the kiss, and shut his eyes.


End file.
